Shackleton's Antarctic whisky found

Photo: PDVos
In 1909, British explorer Ernest Shackleton aborted an attempt to reach the south pole. He abandoned two cases of scotch at base camp. A century on, we've found it.

Whyte & Mackay, the drinks group that now owns McKinlay and Co., has asked for a sample of the 100-year-old scotch for a series of tests that could decide whether to relaunch the now-defunct Scotch. Workers from New Zealand's Antarctic Heritage Trust will use special drills to reach the crates, frozen in Antarctic ice under the Nimrod Expedition hut near Cape Royds.

Thought discovered in 2006, conservation guidelines impose strict rules on how the ice-embedded bottles may be recovered. Whyte & Mackay's master blender says it will taste extactly as it did 100 years ago.
Company Wants To Drill For Whiskey Lost In Antarctic [CBS]

It’s not Boing Boing’s goof. The article itself is titled “Company Wants To Drill For Whiskey Lost In Arctic”, despite the fact that the very first sentence starts out “A beverage company has asked a team to drill through Antarctica’s ice….”

This made me think of William Sokolin’s bottle of Chateau Margaux, allegedly from Thomas Jefferson’s cellar.* He broke it while showing it off (Look at my Ridiculously Expensive Thing, you peons!), and, tasting a remnant of it, pronounced it “flinty and unsatisfying.”

Whiskey keeps better than wine…as long as the corks are intact. But, from the article:

[Expedition leader] Fastier said he did not want to sample the contents.

“It’s better to imagine it than to taste it,” he said. “That way it keeps its mystery.”

I think there might be something wrong with that man.
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*It was a fake, 18th-century but not from Jefferson’s cellar…he still collected $200K from the insurance company.

In the U.S., we drink (and write about) whiskey with an E regardless of origin. Canadian whiskey, Scotch whiskey, Irish whiskey. Same with cheese: we don’t call it fromage just because it cam from France, it’s still called cheese here. We drink and write about wine and not vin or vino even though it goes by those different (but similar) names in other countries where it is produced.

In 1909, the most common spelling of whiskey in Scotland was with an ‘e’. The first definition of Scotch Whiskey, published in 1909 by the Royal Commission on Whiskey and Other Potable Spirits also used the ‘e’ spelling. Neither spelling is incorrect in any country. Here is a link to an article I published a few years ago on the nonsense of the whisky spelling gestapo.http://www.maltmaniacs.org/malt-109.html#0810
Davin